📣 I wrote a blog post with AI: Here's what happened

Hi off-social marketing friends,

I went through a content writing experiment this week for one of my businesses and want to share it with you. I wanted to understand the capabilities of AI for content creation better and tried it out.

So, here we are. Buckle up for the re-telling of my cyber adventure.

The Blog Post

I let AI write a blog post for Log Off - Live More, one of my businesses, where we help people stop scrolling and start living their best lives offline.

The post was on how to do a digital detox and you can read it here:

AI copywriting tools have been around for a while and at first, I was hesitant to try them out. Would they be any good, do I want to live in a world where writing is produced entirely by machines? What's our contribution as humans in a world where machines can do ever-more complex tasks for us? Complicated questions with multi-faceted answers...

When I got an email earlier this week about a trend in AI copywriting, my curiosity won. I had to try it and share the result with the world.

It's interesting how the platform I used, Rytr, let's you choose between different tones: assertive, joyful, convincing, humble. It was definitely fun to play with those for a moment. As an aside: there are several AI writing platforms. I only chose Rytr, because the link was in the email that prompted this whole exploration (no affiliation there).

My Takeaways

I think the result is a bit...clunky.

While the process was quite fun for a first time (I felt like somebody was writing my home work for me in high school), I think the result is a bit...clunky. The text sounds like somebody was regurtitating empty truisms and phrases. That might change though, when the next edition of AI writing protocols (GPT-4) will likely come out later this year that will be a LOT better.

Where it could be helpful

Dealing with communication overwhelm

Sometimes, the deluge of communication that's part of running a business - emails, pitches, copywriting, sales pages, sequences etc - can be a lot, especially for a small team or solopreneur with little outsourcing. At the end of a long day of communicating, have you ever felt like you've used up all your words and writing mojo for weeks to come?

It could be helpful to pre-generate some template texts for standard communication situations with AI and then edit/tweak it to what you need it to do. And then, there's always the email app superhuman than can already help you with that.

Saving time/energy - editing instead of writing

I'm a better editor than writer. It comes more easily, especially when I didn't write the text myself - which is the case with AI. Going from an existing draft and then adding human sprinkles and your own voice to it, might be worth a try to streamline the content product process.

SEO inspiration

What was interesting about my experience with Rytr was that the program generated SEO-worthy headlines and paragraphs and even listed the keywords at the end of a paragraph. I don't really like SEO writing for blog posts, it saps my creative juices dry - even though I know it's really helpful. I could definitely see myself using an AI generated text or headlines as the editing base for an SEO optimized blog post. Like I said above, it's easier for me to edit than write this type of content from scratch, so this could be helpful.

The challenges? An AI-fueled content creation arms race where the reader loses out

If you can create an SEO-oriented blog post in 5 minutes like I did this week, imagine what that means for all of our marketing online. I could see this turning into an arms race where whoever posts most, wins - especially the more sophisticated these technologies become. The person who loses out the most here is the reader, because quantity and quality are never the same thing. Not even with chocolate and sex.

A chance to stand out

Not all is lost though in this very meh view I painted of the world in the paragraph above. Until AI is so sophisticated that it can imitate our own voice in writing (that will be wild!), good, personal content full of warmth will stand out even more. Who wants to read pre-canned posts that sounds like they come out of the content vending machine. Press 1 for sales-optimized, press 2 for conversion, press 3 for loyalty building, press 4 for...

We market, after all, to connect with people. And as people writing for people we can always excel at that. Now, if the AI helps me with my SEO headlines, maybe I won't even mind so much :D

Hit reply and tell me: what do you think of the blog post and have you ever thought about AI tools for your writing?

Sending my best and marketing mojo to you,

Johanna 📣